Data network activities increases as more and more computers are connected through data networks, and more and more applications utilize the data networks for their functions. Therefore, it becomes more important to protect the data network against security breaches.
There are currently many security gateways such as firewalls, VPN firewalls, parental control appliances, email virus detection gateways, special gateways for phishing and spyware, intrusion detection and prevention appliances, access control gateways, identity management gateways, and many other types of security gateways. These products are typical implemented using a general purpose micro-processor such as Intel Pentium, an AMD processor or a SPARC processor, or an embedded micro-processor based on RISC architecture such as MIPS architecture, PowerPC architecture, or ARM architecture.
Micro-processor architectures are limited in their processing capability. Typically they are capable of handling up to a gigabit per second of bandwidth. In the past few years, data network bandwidth utilization increases at a pace faster than improvements of microprocessor capabilities. Today, it is not uncommon to see multi-gigabit per second of data network bandwidth utilization in many medium and large secure corporate data networks. It is expected such scenarios to become more prevailing in most data networks, including small business data network, residential networks, and service provider data networks.
The trend in the increasing usage of data networks illustrates a need for better and higher capable security gateways, particularly in using multiple processing elements, each being a micro-processor or based on micro-processing architecture, to work in tandem to protect the data networks.